belt cleaning?

[Lothos]

I was curious how other folks deal with contaminated belts going into their smelting areas or coal consumption.

[NimrodAbsolution⁧⁧98]

Don't contaminate it in the first place and if by some accident you do then just run along and grab it

[Lothos]

you do realize that sometimes its impossible to avoid? and collecting by hand is terrible in very large amounts. Yes, I know about filter inserters too. I'm talking about more reliable approaches.

[NimrodAbsolution⁧⁧98]

Originally posted by lothos:

you do realize that sometimes its impossible to avoid?

Not the way I've done my belts in the passed.
Albeit I don't use any main bus.

[Lothos]

you didn't even read my OP. thanks :P

[NimrodAbsolution⁧⁧98]

Originally posted by lothos:

you didn't even read my OP. thanks :P

I did
In that case:

Originally posted by *Notices your bulge*:

Don't contaminate it in the first place

[Lothos]

and like I said, its impossible to avoid sometimes. How do you mine mixed resource deposits? By hand or do you simply ignore them? If you can't comment with something meaningful why bother responding in the first place?

[NimrodAbsolution⁧⁧98]

Originally posted by lothos:

How do you mine mixed resource deposits?

By mining away at the two sections seperately via specifc placement of the drills as to not get any one drill mining two resources at once

I assumed by "contanimated" you meant one type of resource you're making ending up in a place it shouldn't go, Didn't think you meant mining.

Originally posted by lothos:

If you can't comment with something meaningful why bother responding in the first place?

You not liking my response =/= My response being unmeaningful.

[Lothos]

some deposits spawn in such a way that you cannot mine either without overlap.

[NimrodAbsolution⁧⁧98]

Originally posted by lothos:

some deposits spawn in such a way that you cannot mine either without overlap.

As long as you can keep mining a single ore tile off the edges than you still have hope

[Luzilyo]

had a similar problem going on. ended up switching to drones almost entirely. definitely not the most efficient way to handle things and pretty power demanding to have enough drones and hangars for everything, but my base looked much cleaner and i never had to deal with any sort of contamination again. for me, that was worth it.

so, just keep the resources going into the base on a belt, then put everything in a passive chest and let the drones take it from there to wherever it's supposed to go. like i said, though, it's pretty inefficient and, depending on how much you mine, you might need 500+ drones or even more to handle it at least somewhat acceptable.

i'd rate my solution 7/10. obviously, for me, personally, it's a 10/10 but i know others care about efficiency a lot more than i do.

[Lothos]

nah, the drone method is like trying to solve it with a sledgehammer.

for now its simply a filter inserter and a chest with a regular inserter pulling out of the chest to feed into the correct belt path. The chest I found was needed because the filter would only place on one side of the belt AND if your smelting backs up you end up bypassing the filter.

I had honestly wondered about something similar with my previous map and my train unloading station at my base. I had debated whether I could have a single unload station and filter from there to wherever I needed to unload to, but volume proved too much and I went with independant stations.

[fractalgem]

Originally posted by lothos:

you do realize that sometimes its impossible to avoid? and collecting by hand is terrible in very large amounts. Yes, I know about filter inserters too. I'm talking about more reliable approaches.

What I like to do in these situations is filter the belt into chests, lots of chests. That way there's space to ensure it keeps running even if one of the ores gets backed up. With the belt moving horizontally, it looks like this:

ore belt1
Chests
filter inserter
mixed ore belt
filter inserters
ore belt 2


The other option is to set up a couple of train wagons just sitting there with its inventor ycompletely restricted, and use regular/fast inserters to put stuff into them. Either way, at some point you have to filter the stuff, and you really want a lot of capacity to sort into so that it doesn't clog because of one side backing up, starving you of the other.

[KatherineOfSky]

There are a few methods you could use.
1. Don't mine overlapping areas. They are generally a pain to deal with. As soon as I finish with the clear ore, I find a new deposit -- it's just not worth the hassle.

2. Filter inserters -- use rows of them if you have to.

3. Filtered train wagons -- use regular inserters to pull the appropriate ore into a train car with reserved slots... then output on the other side.

[Light]

If you enjoy using combinators, you can use a few to create a variable that stops the belt right in front of the filter inserter so the contaminated item is easily removed. It will continue to start and stop the belt but only the ore you want will get past.

Or you can just use the easy route and have a dozen filter inserters lined up, so you can ignore it for an hour or so.

You should still create a combinator belt block to freeze the belt ahead should the filter chests become full and they attempt to slip by. This is always my favorite method to keep the system clean, and is quite simple to set up without being a combinator wizard.

[Lothos]

I've never tried combinators yet. they didn't exist the last time i played :/ Neither did the stack inserters for that matter.

I'd be pressed to leave them if they were smaller deposits really, but i chose the biggest/richest on mine so we're talking on just the copper/coal and the iron/stone deposit next to my initial spawn of well over a million ore in the mixed area.

My first playthru I went with normal everything and it really really sucked. I'd expend an ore deposit in an hour or less and the oil that did spawn was maybe 1 or 2 puddles at most at great distances.

If I choose to deal with filtering I can remain with my mining in one spot for a significant time.

I just unlocked filter stack inserters last night and was thinking of possibly using those to move the ores between belts directly that then fed into balancers for the individual ore feeds into my base. I honestly don't like my ore input approach thusfar in both games I have played. I keep resorting to a single belt that I then splitter off branch after branch into 10 smelter bank processing legs.